When the Covid pandemic heralded – or accelerated – the revolution in remote and hybrid working across the United States, one New York tech entrepreneur recognized that demand for a channel to create positive team relationships for the benefit of the business and the employee would only increase.
Jump forward two years and according to McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, ninety-two million (58%) of Americans now have the opportunity to work from home part-time. At the same time, Confetti, the business co-founded by Lee Rubin, is booming.
Lee was born in Israel and moved to America when she was four. She grew up in Florida, moved to New York City and founded a business to inspire workplace happiness. Confetti leverages technology to help companies build team cultures with a click of a mouse. They help companies and teams find amazing things to do together, for their clients, and for one another, and Lee has become one of the world’s experts on remote event planning.
Under her leadership, Confetti scaled from $0 to $10m in annual revenue within 2 years using only $4m in funding. She leads a team of 60 people who support a customer base of over 4,000 unique paying companies, including Google, Facebook, Spotify, and many other start-ups, firms and agencies.
With Confetti, discover, plan and book experiences that improve culture – anything from team building and wellness to soft-skill development workshops and DE&I programs. Lee Rubin’s aim is that Confetti not only offers a place for people to book these experiences easily and quickly, but also helps to make the relationships between people, their jobs and their colleagues more meaningful.
“I wanted to be an entrepreneur from a very young age,” she says. “There seems to be no shortage of problems that the world needs us to solve, and I selected one to ‘call my own’.
When I was part of a team before starting Confetti, I saw how much money the company was investing in culture. The problem was that events are really complicated to plan and often the responsibility is left on one random person’s shoulders. The team found it super time consuming to come up with ideas and start reaching out to unresponsive vendors. They usually resorted to going to the bar which wasn’t really building strong, professional and authentic relationships with one another.”
Eventually Lee thought it would be “really cool if there was one website that helped you find these activities to do with your team and book it really easily”.
Confetti started for the in-person world, pre-Covid, so most of the experiences took place inside customers’ offices.
“At the time we had everything from in-office portable laser tag to puppy parties. I started networking and helping dozens of companies put together fun experiences,” continues Lee.
“But shortly after starting Confetti I realized something that is now core to our DNA – if I let any vendor advertise on the website some are going to be good and some are not going to be great. And for experiences that are less than amazing, it’s a missed opportunity to truly connect your team with one another.”
Confetti’s focus has also not just been on experiences that are purely “celebratory” but also on ones that help marginalized individuals feel equal at work, whether through events like Pride, Black History Month or others. Companies can plan these themed events for people outside of that marginalized community to better connect and empathize with their fellow team members.
“At the end of the day, this first step is awareness of the importance of inclusion,” continues Lee. “This sense of togetherness and community is the benefit companies are trying to achieve. There’s an added layer of empathetic education that delves into the history behind these holidays, giving teams a better understanding of exactly what they’re celebrating and why it’s so important.”
And, critically, all the experiences are being delivered by vendors from those respective communities to ensure authenticity in the experience. It is also a way for Confetti to give back to those businesses as well as to their end user clients.
“My management team and myself had several long, meaningful conversations about what allyship means,” continues Lee.
We knew we wanted to give our customers authentic experiences and we knew we wanted to be good allies. So, long story short, we decided only to select vendors who were from the represented community. It did make our job harder, but we decided the best way to be a true ally was to support communities directly by putting money into their pockets.”
In essence, Confetti exists to make workplaces better, to help teams and individuals connect, and tto be more productive and happier at work.
“So many people look forward to Fridays and dread Mondays, and that’s such a terrible way to live,” adds Lee.
“Confetti wants to change the relationship that people have with their jobs. We want to help companies create deeper meaning between colleagues and improve the work that they’re doing. If people like their team members, they communicate better – and if people enjoy their time together, they’ll succeed more and solve problems better, faster.”